Posted on 06/27/2015 7:21:39 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Is that electric car in the driveway — yes, that one with the long cord tethering it to the inside of the garage — a sign of deep environmental concern and human goodness? Or is it an indication that someone has been duped?
A growing body of evidence shows that electric cars are more harmful to the environment than comparable fossil-fuel burners. The latest is a study — "Environmental Benefits From Driving Electric Vehicles?" — out this month from the National Bureau of Economic Research.
The study's authors — economics and business professors — say that "rather than simply accepting the assertion of environmental benefits from electric vehicle use," they conducted "a rigorous comparison of the environmental consequences of gasoline and electric powered vehicles, specifically by quantifying the externalities (both greenhouse gases and local air pollution) generated by driving these vehicles."
This rigorous comparison determined that electric cars, despite the hype, aren't as environmentally clean as gasoline-powered cars.
This shouldn't be a complete surprise, given that much of the electricity used to charge electric cars is generated by coal plants, which produce 39% of the nation's electricity. The next biggest producer is natural gas, another fossil fuel, which churns out 27% of our power. Nor is this the first time electric cars' dirty little secret has been uncovered.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.investors.com ...
Which I intend to gleefully point out to my liberal friends every chance I get.
I think the dirtiest secret is battery performance drops in hot weather and especially cold weather. Also range is significantly impacted by having to run heat or AC. So the Tesla will perform best if you live in San Diego.
So if it takes 2 hours to charge your battery, these cars might not be good for a cross country trip. You would have to know there was a place to charge everywhere you stopped. How many miles would a charge last?
Read post 13. It would take me $22 to pump 65kwh into the Tesla batteries.
At the end of that cord recharging you electric car is not only fossil fuel burning power plant, but windmills blighting the landscape and chopping up condors and bald eagles and solar plants frying birds and killing desert critters not to mention lithium battery plants in China so polluting that no western nation would tolerate them.
You can only drive until the batteries are 1/2 discharged. Then you must either turn around and head back to your last charging station or be confident that there is another charging station up ahead for charging. If it is not a fast charger, you will also need a motel room to sleep in while your battery charges.
Electric cars are commuter vehicles, they just do not work cross country. You have to pair a compatible charging system with a motel, and do not drive more than a couple of hundred miles a day. Of course most electric cars are hybtids, they burn gas too. If you go the business route, theoreticly a regenerative braking system could recover a portion of the energy stopping at red lights, but on freeways it does not recover the losses of dragging around the battery pack.
IMHO
If it is a fast charger it will take 2 hours. In that case you will need lawn chairs and a tarp to sit under while the battery fast charges. You can watch the gasoline cars whiz by as you wait 2 hours for your battery to charge.
Hybrids are another scam. They only work in stop and go traffic conditions. On a regular trip the batteries are just dead weight that reduce your cross country gas mileage.
Cars like the Volt actually do make sense if you must have an electric car. For commutes over short distances you can relie on your battery charge from your electtic utility. For a longer trip you can use gasoline to recharge your battery as you drive.
The environmental cost of the manufacture if the battery has to be considered along with your points. At least with current technology and electric power production, the electric car is a dead end approach.
You are exactly right. I have always been fascinated by electric powered vehicles. As an experiment I built up two bicycles, one with an electric hub motor and the other with a 2 stroke Chinese gasoline engine. Both the gas engine and the electric hub motor came as kits from eBay.
The gas engine came with everything for $80 including shipping. I put it on an old mountain bike and it was quite impressive. The bike with the engine and full fuel weighed about 70 pounds. The tank held about a gallon but it would take you a long ways. It would do 35mph and had a completely different feel than a motorcycle or mini-bike. Despite having only a clutch and no transmission it had impressive power in its “power band”. It was of course noisy, smoky, and not street legal.
The “brushless” electric motor kit cost more than $200 and I had to buy the batteries locally for $130 along with a case and rack to hold them for another $50. I put them on a “hybrid” bicycle I got from Walmart. The complete package with the bicycle weighed over 100 pounds, but compared to electric bikes available commercially I had twice the power and twice the range. It would go 25mph on the flat and had a range of 25 miles. Technically it was not street legal, because it went faster on its own than what is allowed, but from a practical standpoint I doubt whether you would ever get a ticket.
Compared to the gas engine powered bike it had 1/4 the range, 1/4 the power and weighed approximately 50% more. It didn't climb steep hills well. Once you ran the batteries down the electric scooter charger I had took basically all night to charge them back up. The advantages were that it was basically silent, you could ride past the police without getting in trouble, you didn't have to start the engine, and it didn't make any smoke.
I feel that fooling around with the two bicycles did give me a better understanding of how electric vehicles compare to gasoline powered vehicles. I think that it would be a good “science fair” project for kids, although I am not sure that it would result in politically correct conclusions.
Good post. I completely agree with you. I use the analogy of electric vs gas clothes dryers. Most folks want a gas dryer because it is much cheaper to operate then an electric dryer; i.e., it is much more efficient to create the heat in the clothes dryer by burning gas, rather than generating the heat at a power station, converting it to electricity, transmiting it over power lines, and finally converting it back to heat in your dryer. Same thing applies to cars.
The $80K Tesla have battery heating and cooling to try and mitigate some of that. Not sure how well it works when it is zero or below..
I've read on blogs that lesser electric cars may not charge until the battery cools down. Or the battery won't quick charge, but will take a standard charge instead.
If you are going to (rightly, IMO) include generation and transmission for electric, you really should include extraction, refining, and transportation for gas.
Part of it, sure. But the fuel for the plant also needs to be extracted, perhaps refined and transported to the plant.
What I was attempting to determine was how far you can drive on 114,000 btus of fuel energy.
The whole idea falls apart if you get your electricity from solar, nuclear, hydro or wind. Though of course all but nuclear are really forms of solar.
The Tesla reportedly functions reasonably well in cold weather if you leave it plugged in until ready to drive. Electricity keeps the battery warm, which is essential for performance.
If you don’t, the car consumes a whole bunch of energy warming the battery and that reduces range considerably.
The car also has built-in cooling for the battery in hot weather, but of course that also consumes energy and so reduced range.
My understanding is that steep hill or mountain driving really blows thru battery power. But then it also burns a lot of gas.
From a co2 perspective:
Tesla 230 miles:
65kw charge x 2.15 lb co2/kw at coal plant = 140 lb co2.
35mpg gasoline car 230 miles:
230miles / 35 mpg = 6.6 gal gasoline.
At 6 kw per gallon to refine = 40 kw = 79 lb co2.
Plus 20 lb co2 (1c/2o) per gallon of gasoline burned = 132 lb co2.
Gas engine total for 230 miles = 211 lb co2.
Interesting, thanks. I assume all other sources for electricity would be cleaner.
Can you run the same numbers for energy consumption, say in btus or kil-calories?
Having lived thru 2 ‘energy crises’, my interest in electric vehicles is centered in the notion that diversification of ‘fuel’ could be vital.So I wonder if the Persian gulf is shut down due to war, how would that affect domestic gasoline supplies. Any thoughts?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.